Abstract
There are two significant “players” in development projects: the project manager and the systems engineer. They work together with the aim of meeting the technical (execution/performance, quality) and managerial (schedule, costs, and customer satisfaction) goals of the project.
The purposes of the current study (Kordova S, Katz E, Frank M, Syst Eng 22(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21474) are to identify the management processes shared by project managers and systems engineers in the defense industry; to understand which factors influence the ways in which joint project management is accomplished and how it impacts meeting project goals; and to provide recommendations for joint project management that will lead to project success.
The research method was qualitative, based on 16 semi-structured interviews with project managers and systems engineers in defense companies that deal with the development of technological systems.
The main recommendations for joint project management are: Set a clear distribution of responsibility and delegation of authority between the both parties before starting the project; choose a project manager who was once a systems engineer or who possesses knowledge of engineering; insist on ongoing dialogue between the two professionals; solve/prevent conflicts through discussion and persuasion; and expand the common ground between the project manager and systems engineer’s areas of responsibility.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Gordon Center for Systems Engineering at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, for their support of this study.
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Kordova, S., Kats, E., Frank, M. (2022). Project Managers and Systems Engineers, “Can two walk together, unless they agree?”: Recent Research Findings on Development Projects. In: Madni, A.M., Boehm, B., Erwin, D., Moghaddam, M., Sievers, M., Wheaton, M. (eds) Recent Trends and Advances in Model Based Systems Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82083-1_38
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